Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
Dark Branches Against a Dark Sky
Friday, June 20th, 2008
I was moving slowly because I was sick. Not sick because of the cancer, even though it was running through my body like ants exploring a doughnut box, but because of the chemo. Cancer kills; chemo just makes you wish you were dead.
Someone was following me, and I was moving too slowly.
He’d started to follow me six blocks from my house, from where he’d been lurking in the doorway of the dollar store that closed two years ago and and has been vacant ever since. Maybe he was waiting for me, or maybe he had just paused for a moment and I caught his eye as I passed, but I was sure he was following me. The streets were empty. There was no one else he could be following.
He was tall, strong, dark, with glittering eyes and a long coat the gray of old cobwebs, but I hadn’t been able to make out his face. I turned the corner by the empty lot and thought about running, but my body ached at even the idea, so I ducked behind a newspaper vending box and looked back at him.
He nodded at me and walked faster. I disregarded the aches and broke into a run after all.
Three blocks from my house were the old maple trees, grown so much next to the sidewalk that their roots crinkled it into uneven steps. I was trying to be careful of the sidewalk there, but it was dusk and hard to see, and my feet were tired, so my toes caught at one of the roots, and I tumbled and sprawled at the foot of the tree. That’s when something inside me broke, something deep and central, breaking not so much from the fall but from all of it: the cancer, the chemo, the running, the fear. I tried to breathe, but the air was like wet rags stuffed into my mouth.
He caught up to me and stopped to sit among the roots, looking down into my face with a melancholy smile. His face was my face. He was like a reflection of me in a dark pool. He was my death.
My death took my hand, and I began to trickle away into him, and I stopped laboring to breathe, and the deep pain lifted, and at last I was looking down into a face that stared blankly at dark branches against a dark sky.
Good news from the European National Lottery Foundation
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
As scams go, this one was lousy. But only one person had to fall for it for it to work.
“Hello, this is Arthur Gentry from the European National Lottery Foundation,” I said when she picked up. “Is Mr. Thomas Geiger in?”
She said the usual thing.
“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said. Actually, I wasn’t. Sometimes Geiger wasn’t dead, and on those calls I just hung up. Angry dead men unnerved me.
“I’m sorry to disturb you at a time like this,” I said, “But I may have some very good news for you. Did Mr. Geiger tell you about the European National Lottery Foundation ticket he purchased on July third? No? Then, perhaps you can find the ticket? I’ll wait.”
When she finally gave up forty minutes later, I resumed the patter. I assured her that if she could supply proper identification, she could still get her prize, after some legal costs.
“… I know,” I said at the end. “I don’t understand it either, but gold bullion is what the lawyers said.” Wait, and … laugh. “So, overnighted today, all right? OK, then. Yup. Buh-bye.”
I hung up, then took out the pocket universe hopper and chose the next universe in the sequence, at two hours behind the one I was in. The hopper could create any time shift I wanted between two universes, but two hours was about the most I could manage without getting violently ill.
I already knew what the new universe would be like: all the others. Very little changes from one version of reality to the next. That’s why I was working the same scam over and over, in universe after universe. Pretty soon I would have enough to set me up for life.
I jumped.
The jump left me with the usual harsh, queasy feeling, and I was taken by surprise when someone slapped the hopper out of my hand from behind. Then he spun me around and kneed me in the stomach. I collapsed, wheezing, as he picked up the hopper and put it in his pocket. The funny thing was, he had a bulge of the exact same shape and size in his other pocket.
He was old, maybe late sixties, but built like a side of beef. “Mr. Geiger?” I finally managed to gasp. But if he already had a hopper, that meant he was going to take the hopper he’d just gotten from me and hop back in time to give it to himself–
“I want to talk to you,” he said, “about my wife.” And he leaned over me like a falling piano.